Flyover People
Cheryl Unruh
Originally published 01:12 p.m., April 22, 2008
Updated 01:12 p.m., April 22, 2008
Editor’s note: This edition of Flyover People is an encore column that first was published in April 2004.
When you live on a farm or in a tiny Kansas community, you spend a lot of time on the highways, going to town.
Maybe you commute to work. Or, if you go to a movie, there is always that 10 or 20-mile drive. It’s the same trip to run errands or go bowling.
You see the same scenery day after day.
Perhaps it was all those days as a kid, riding in a car 13 miles east to Great Bend or eight miles west to Larned, that bonded me with the landscape.
In “Population: 485,” Michael Perry wrote, “You belong to the land first. From there, your allegiances grow more fluid.”
For those of us who have lived here a long time, the prairie is like family — an everyday and eternal part of our lives. We’re unable to escape that line of horizon. Even with our eyes closed, we see two-thirds sky and one-third earth.
Perry wrote, “Twelve years I lived away from here and what I missed — what I craved — was the lay of the land. A familiar corner, a particular hill, certain patches of trees. Somewhere along the line, my soul imprinted on topography.”
Outsiders may view the entire state as one flat blur, but Kansans notice the changes in the roadside landscape.
Toward Madison, small evergreens pop up in the ditches and pastures. Nearby, on the often-burned open range, the hills have few trees.
As you drive, the shape and closeness of hills changes. And is it just my imagination or do north-south roads generally seem hillier than east-west roads?
Recently, Dave and I drove to Barton County. Somewhere around Lyons, the flat land begins to look more like home to me.
The scenery is different in the western half of the state than it is around Emporia; the earth is more level and grass for grazing is shorter.
Pastures have less texture and fewer wildflowers than the rocky fields of eastern Kansas. Gullies look edgier somehow when they cut through flat ground.
Out west, cropland consumes more acres than pastures do. Fields are planted with wheat or corn, soybeans or milo, and at times the sod lingers with dry and bent stubble.
There, a tree is unlikely to be near a wheat field, whereas in Eastern Kansas, wheat is often planted in the coves of forested areas.
More than anyplace I’ve been, I love the Flint Hills and all of Eastern Kansas. Here, the landscape, the sky and the towns nurture me.
But darned if the flat land out west doesn’t call me “child” as she ruffles my hair with her windy hand.
Eastern Kansas is where I wake each morning, but the western half of Kansas owns my roots and my childhood.
My bones feel different in Western Kansas. When I go for a visit, I feel a peeling back of the self.
Perry wrote, “I returned and the land felt right. The land takes you back. All you have to do is show up.”
During my youth, I spent many hours alone on the sandstone outcropping of Pawnee Rock State Park. If one location formed me, it was that high view overlooking the plains.
The Rock is where I often went to sort things out. Sitting on top of the pavilion, on a pillar facing south, I let the wind blow through me, let it blow away the sorrows.
In “Wolf Willow,” Wallace Stegner wrote, “When I feel the need to return to the womb, this is still the place toward which my well-conditioned unconscious turns like an old horse heading for the barn.”
What is home? Is it family, those genes that twist in our cells? Or could it be the land that raised us as one of its crops?
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net.
• Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.